Download theoretical framework and genesis of cultural materialism

УДК 32.001
L. Bidochko
Theoretical Framework and Genesis
of Cultural Materialism in Political Studies
The article deals with the main methodological and theoretical background of cultural materialism as
an anthropological approach and a research strategy. Synthesizing Marxists’ historical materialism, cultural ecology, and neo-evolutionism, first cultural materialist Marvin Harris elaborates a tripartite scheme of
the cultural system (infrastructure, structure, and superstructure), extending and extolling the infrastructure as something that includes demography and ecosystems, in addition to the productive forces and mode
of production. Cultural materialism rejects dialectical materialism and class struggle, giving priority to infrastructural variables in the causal arrow of determination.
Keywords: cultural anthropology, cultural materialism, determinism, emic and etic, historic materialism,
Marxism, neo-evolutionism, reductionism, structure and superstructure.
With the development of the humanities, there
was a problem of their scientification, development
of uniform and universally accepted theoretical and
methodological foundations, principles of obtaining
and structuring of knowledge about the man and society. In this respect, natural sciences seemed to be
the obvious model for the humanities, as they were
much more developed. The principles of causality
and nomology that allowed the natural sciences to
create an adequate model of the material world and
to promote technical progress, could provide for development of social knowledge as well, freeing it
from the descriptiveness, subjectivity, and teleology, and enable the social progress.
Immanuel Kant stated that the doctrine of the nature would contain science in its proper sense only
to the extent that Mathematics can be applied to it;
in XIX–XX centuries, physics rules the roost in the
philosophy of science. A “bridge,” which managed
to connect the natural sciences and humanities, was
embedded in biology. Evolutionism quickly adhered to the social sciences. The success of biology
and psychology in explaining the nature of the higher nervous activity contributed to finding the material basis of the “spiritual world” and considering
the external stimuli as causes of human behavior.
Seeking to adopt the unity of science, which could
not be provided by the so-called “first positivism,”
Friedrich Engels interpreted social development as
the highest form of motion of the matter (mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic), which emerge
on the basis of the lower elements; it includes but is
not reducible to them.
As a result, the humanities have been scientified
by taking materialist methodology. The latter was
© Bidochko L., 2016
not just drown from the natural sciences (as in the
case of mechanicism), but converted in accordance
with the object of study, the human society, which
was seen as an enormously complex, but objective
and cognizable system. Historical materialism, developed by Karl Marx, became the blueprint for the
modernhistorical and sociological science. On the
one hand, scientific schools, positioning themselves
as Marxist and neo-Marxist, continue to play a significant role in the academic environment currently.
On the other hand, criticism of Marxism not only
contributes to the renewal of historical materialism
(as in the case of moving the research focus of the
culture and ideology by GyörgyLukácsand Antonio
Gramsci), but borrows many of Marx’s postulates
(like Max Weber in sociology, AnnalesSchool in
history); it also became a mechanism for de-politization and legitimizing Marxism.
If at the level of concrete scientific methodology
historical materialism successfully seeped in the humanities, in the field of general scientific philosophy
came under attacks held in various directions. The
actual purpose of these attacks was forcing Marxism out of the scientific horizon. Historical materialism was accused of politicizing science, reductionism, and metaphysics. Of course, Marxist scholars
were in sympathy with leftist political movements
or even directly participated in them. However, this
politicization could not be necessarily explained by
the ill will of scientists towards making scientific
objectivity turbid. They rather came out of the postulate of post-non-classic philosophy of science
about social determinism of the science. In addition,
studying the dynamics of social development, social
science will inevitably integrate predictive and
L. Bidochko. Theoretical Framework and Genesis of Cultural Materialism in Political Studies prescriptive functions, which leads to the increasingly important interest in the scientific community
to political regulation of the social development.
Reductionism has never been a Marxist methodological principle; on the contrary, the classics of Mar­
xism rejected it, stressing the autonomy of spheres of
public life, such as politics or culture (although history
critics have tried to put the materialist conception as
“economic reductionism»). Yet reductionism and the
concomitant use of implicit deduction became a bug of
the theoretical considerations and case studies of many
orthodox Marxists. Nevertheless, this trend has been
observed among the other, non-Marxist schools in the
social sciences. This can be explained by the fact that
society is a chaotic system, the complexity of which
increases against the background of progress in different spheres of social life (the economy, social structure, and culture). Social sciences, seeking to fulfill
their practical function, tend to simplify their own theoretical constructs and methodological approaches for
to give the desired result (the formation of ideologies
and social engineering).
In short, the social sciences have not kept pace
with the social development, which ultimately leads
to an increase in the irrelevance of models they offer.
The response to this in the scientific community is either creation of new theories, or update of the conceptual and methodological arsenal of existing ones
(development of “protective belt” of the research program, to use the terminology of ImreLakatos), return
to the starting point of epistemology, “blessed” by the
founding fathers. One of the most vivid examples of
such a return in the history of science is a famous slogan
of Otto Liebmann “Back to Kant!” that lay the foundation of philosophical schools of neo-Kantianism.
Thus, the Western neo-Marxists criticized the
“mechanistic reductionism” and “economic reductionism” of Second International theorists (KautskyBernstein-Plekhanov), referring to Marx’s “The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” and Engels’s “Letter to Joseph Bloch.” Post-positivists
aimed their criticism at the real inherent versatility of
the explanatory paradigm inherent to the historical
materialism (“metaphysical” in Popper’s terminology). However, according to the criteria of falsifiability, virtually the entire humanitarian science falls beyond the understanding of science in Popper’s
sense. This approach has resonated in the part of the
humanitarian response of the scientific community.
But the construction of humanitarian epistemology
(“alloscience”*) thatradically differs from epistemology of the natural sciences leads either to a veiled return
to the natural science approach (e.g., quasi-causality
* «Инонаучный» – term of Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin.
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of Finnish philosopher G. H. von Wright) or to the approval of the postmodern “ignoramus et ignorabimus,”
defamatory social knowledge.
Construed as being of secondary importance,
some­times secondary constraints needs to be placed at
the heart of interpreting the paradigm.All the scientific
knowledge is instrumentalized and socially constructed. Any scientific approach and scientific knowledge
as such is still massively dependent on political, economic, financial, ideological, moral, and other “nonacademic” elements; political stimulus often determines the formation and assessment of the knowledge.
Let us outline the academic and ideological “cradle” of cultural materialism. It was in the Columbia
University; then some of these people moved to the
University of Michigan. By and large, different people there came from Brooklyn; they have returned
from the Second World War and had left-wing leanings, hence the materialism. “It was the time of McCarthyism, – Stephen Reyna, one of the students of
Marvin Harris notes. – If you were known as a leftist, you would not get a job. So they tended to create
left positions, but they left out the explicitly left language. I was part of them. I was a student of Marvin
Harris... We were for the most part “progressives” in
the US, not explicit Marxists.”
“There was the counterculture, the War, Black
Power, Women’s Lib, Stonewall, SDS and Weatherman. Revolution. They all played out in front of
your eyes, from the later 1960s through the early
1970s. You could not escape the power of events to
shape ideas,” notes Brian Ferguson, another student
of Harris [2, p. 2].
Although McCarthyism, heightened political repression against supposed leftists, became thing of
the past, and cultural materialism was born in late
1960s, opened declaring of leftism at that time was
not preferable. Left intellectuals, in fact, have also
mimicked. It cannot be said though that cultural materialism was a veiled version of Marxism. Cultural
materialism was rather a revision of Marxism; and
the nature of roots of revisionism seem to be more
woven than just camouflaging historical materialism
by calling it an anthropological research strategy.
Scientific research strategy is an unequivocal set
of guidelines referring to some epistemological status of the studied variables, the kinds of lawful relations between them, and connected theories, created
by the strategy [3, p. 26]. Before defining the features of cultural materialism as a research strategy,
Harris criticizes Marx and Engels for alligation of
philosophical ontological notions and sociostructural issues. The aim of their strategy was to demystify
the social life through unveiling socially constructed illusions that distort people’s consciousness.
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The people must identify themselves “not as they
may appear in their own or their people’s imagination, but as they really are” [5, p. 36–37]. Harris believes that the notion of “real” (real living individuals, real active men) isquite blurred therefore problematic, arguing that defining reality is the matter of
epistemologists, not of the scientific materialists:
“thoughts about things and events are separable
from things and events” [3, p. 30]. Materialists
therefore must get scientific knowledge not by setting “real” against “unreal,” but by dividing social
life into mental and behavioral events, in other
words. In order to explain people’s thoughts and behavior in scientific Adapting linguistic theory of
Kenneth Pike, Harris calls participant’s perspective
“emic,” and observer’s perspective “etic” [3, p. 31–
32]. Harris premonishes from confusing emic/etic
distinction with subjective/objective meaning. Both
view of insider and observer are needed to give
more precise knowledge about the subject of study;
however, the etic explanation is more preferable by
the strategy of cultural materialism. The anthropologist claims that divergence between these two standpoints shows the degree to which the members of social group are mystified by their common views.
The aim of cultural materialism is “a statement
about the nature of cultural systems, which can include emic human responses to perceived environments that have some measurable etic physical attributes” [1, p. 183].
Next, stating the strategic principles of cultural
materialism is in order.
Marvin Harris managed to synthesize three scientific approaches: Marxists’ historical materialism,
cultural ecology, and neo-evolutionism. Nevertheless, strategy of cultural materialism is separated
from dialectical materialism and from philosophical
materialism in order to avoid metaphysical disputations concerning the “question of ontological priority of matter over mind.
Contrary to its defamation due to the vulgarized
Soviet interpretation, historical materialism has
found very important application in Western historians. An example of this might be British historical
materialism, represented by the Communist Party
Historians Group (most of them at different times had
left it, expressing their disagreement with the Soviet
interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia), and
the New Left around the magazines «Past and Present» and «New Left Review». Armed with an appeal
of the French Marxist historians Georges Lefebvre
and Albert Mathiez to explore the history of masses,
representatives of British historical materialism demonstrated the breadth of its non-dogmatic application
to the study of history. In such a way, they launched a
line of “history from below,” or “people’s history”.
НАУКОВІ ЗАПИСКИ Наукма. 2016. Том 186. Політичні науки
Unlike politicized British historians, members of
the French Annales School have never identified
themselves as Marxists and actively challenged the
latters. However, they can also be included to the
materialist approach to history. Assigning primacy
of material factors (not just economic ones, but demographic and climate as well), like true Marxist
historical materialism, Annales School highlighted
the lack of attention to the effects of consciousness
on the historical process.
However, in other social sciences, besides historical ones, researchers who were under the influence
of Marxism and its historical-materialist paradigm,
largely avoided identification of “historical materialism,” using instead a different terminology that
tagged their link to the Marxist tradition and critical
theory, like “radical geography” by David Harvey.
In international relations theory and historical
sociology, in addition to well-known world-system
theory (Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank), which draws upon
the writings of Karl Marx andFernandBraudel of
Annales School, when interpreting capitalism, there
is a school of “political Marxism” (Robert Brenner,
Ellen Meiksins Wood, BennoTeschke), whose representatives put emphasis on class conflict in the
center of their analysis. The impact of historical materialism could be also seen in postcolonial studies
in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Typical examples of this could be the work of a historian from
Guiana, Walter Rodney, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” ​​and the Subaltern Studies in South
Asia and Latin America.
«Cultural materialism» can also be counted as
the original tradition of historical materialism, taking into account the specific conditions of American
anthropology influencing the formation of this direction. First of all, this was the discussion between
diffusionistschool of Franz Boas and his opponent,
the founder of cultural studies Leslie White and his
theory of “universal evolution.” The latter had borrowed many of the Marxist approach and achievements of Lewis H. Morgan, to whom Friedrich Engels referred in his work “The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State.” Influenced by White,
who paid much attention to the material and technological factors, Julian Steward formulated the theory of “multilinear cultural evolution” and the methodology of “cultural ecology,” which examines people’s adaptation to social and natural environment.
Founder of the “cultural materialism” Marivn Harris belonged to a group of White and Steward’s apprentices, students of “Mundial Upheaval Society”
who were interested in applying materialist approach to the anthropological theory. Other members of this circle (Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, Stanley
L. Bidochko. Theoretical Framework and Genesis of Cultural Materialism in Political Studies Diamond, Robert Manners, Robert Murphy, and
Morton Fried, a teacher of Marshall Sahlins) also
used historical materialism. This primarily relates to
Eric R. Wolf and his “Europe and the People Without History,” which is based on Marxist methodology and considers capitalism as a world system.
Cultural materialism of Marvin Harris has inherited Marxist division of base and structure. Marvin
Harris proceeds from four key premises, based on
biological and psychological constants of human
nature. First, each society deals with problems of
production – “behaviorally satisfying minimal requirements for subsistence,” [3,p.50] whichis defined as etic behavioral mode of production.Second,
the society copes with the reproduction issue, which
includes balancing between sharp increase and decrease of the population; behavioral mode of reproduction. Third, human collective entity deals with
establishing “secure and orderly behavioral relationships among its constituent groups and with other societies,” [3, p.50] or etic behavioral domestic
economies and etic behavioral political economies.
Finally, the speech acts and symbolic dimension
(which plays a significant role in people’s consciousness) lead to productive behavior in terms of
ethics, art, sports, etc. – behavioral superstructure.
What belongs to infrastructure is mode of production and mode of reproduction. The first means
mechanisms that expands or limits the basic subsistence production (different forms of energy, including food) by reference to peculiarities provided by a
specific technology interacting with specific surroundings. With regard to production, these are
technology of subsistence, techno-environmental
relationships, work patterns and ecosystems. With
respect to reproduction, these are demography,
mating patterns, fertility, natality, mortality, nurturance of infants, medical control of demographic patterns, contraception, abortion, infanticide [3, p. 52].
Structure in terms of cultural materialism means
domestic economy, organization of reproduction and
basic production within the domestic structural units,
and political economy, organization of reproduction,
production, exchange, and consumption within larger
political entities (states, chiefdoms, bands). Domestic
economies include family structure, domestic division of labor, age and sex roles, domestic discipline
and hierarchies, socialization, education, and enculturation. Political economies embrace division of
labor, taxation, tribute, political organization, associations and corporations, political socialization and
enculturation, police/military control, urban/rural
hierarchies, class, caste, and war [3, p. 52–53].
Behavioral superstructure includes art, music,
dance, literature, advertising, rituals, sports, games,
science [3, p. 53]
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In other words, infrastructure deals with human
beings as biological population, compounding of
variables of relations with the environment, forms
of labor, technology, and demography. Structure
considers humans as social creatures, which are in a
web of economy, politics, and kinship. Superstructure relates to people as thinking creatures that share
some ideology, beliefs, and cultural peculiarities.
Marvin Harris merges under a single causal umbrella three fundamental pillars of cultural materialism: infrastructure, structure, and superstructure.
But this causal web is embraced with a principle of
infrastructural determinism, which means that the
modes of production and modes of reproduction determine domestic and political economies, as well
as superstructural units (ideologies, religion, standards and philosophies). Research strategy of cultural materialism in its strict understanding prescribes investigating social and cultural phenomena
with the direct nod to infrastructure. In a broad
meaning, infrastructural determinism gives the priority to the infrastructure as a basic mover of cultural and social phenomena and its precedence in the
causal arrow of determination.
Any modern approach, sustained in Marxian
interpretations of culture, deals with considering
Marx’s tenet about determining superstructure and
determining base. The very notion ’determining’
has a dual nature (let us call it dialectic) in a sense of
setting margins and limits, from the one hand, and
external causation, from the other. Infrastructural
determinism roots in some bio-psychological constants [6, p. 31].
Actually, Harris is far from being the first scientist that underlines the determining role of the infrastructure in explaining sociocultural phenomena.
It was Marx who stated that “the mode of production in material life determines the general character
of the social, political, and spiritual processes of
life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” [4,
p. 21]. However, Harris criticizes Marx’s approach
for ambiguity of mode of production, absence of
discussion of the mode of reproduction, lack of distinction between emic and etic, and his reliance on
Hegelian dialectic, calling it “the Hegelian monkey” on Marx and Engel’s back [3, p. 56].
Adopting ecology and evolution as the causal
explanation of sociocultural phenomena, Harris discards dialectics, rejecting the idea that it is “negation of negation” which enables the progress. In addition to dialectical Marxism, he also rejected historical materialism. Cultural materialism that has
been oriented to “long term adaptive processes and
functional systems, was weal in understanding the
22
НАУКОВІ ЗАПИСКИ Наукма. 2016. Том 186. Політичні науки
myriad changes observed among non-state peoples – and everyone – in historical time frames,
which often seemed highly conflicted, anything but
adaptive, and impossible to characterize as functional,” Ferguson claims [2, p. 7].
As we might see, Harris reconsidered Marxist
base-structure division into a triple scheme, extending and extoling the infrastructure as something that
includes demography and ecosystems, in addition to
the productive forces and mode of production. Marx
has lambasted Thomas Malthus and his principle of
population, referring to the population growth and
the well-being of the populace. Malthus argued that
overpopulation was the main cause of the people’s
misery. Of course, Harris did not directly inherit this
idea; Malthus rather inspired him to use the demographic figures into the basis-structure model, giving
it an equal primary role.
Summing up the key novelties of cultural ma­­
terialism in the environment of sociocultural anthropology, the brave attempt to differentiate the true
gist of reality beyond imagination should be noted.
First, this is commitment to science. Secondly,
emic-etic division should be perceived as a consequence of eliminating the unfalsifiable notions and
scientific categories (such as real active men of
Marx and Engels). Third, idea about pivotal role of
environment and demography in explaining the sociocultural phenomena. Harris combines Marx’s
idea of forces and relations of production with Malthusian idea of population dynamics in order to make the scientific explanation more comprehensive.
Forth, improving traditional Marxian “base and superstructure” scheme completing it with emic-etic division. Harris proposes tripartite system of human
life instead – infrastructure, superstructure (Marxist
theory), and structure. Finally, cultural materialism is
also suggesting infrastructural determinism, but not
in a strict sense of orthodox Marxism, when the base
determines the superstructure in a one-way connection. Harris does not exclude the reverse relation between the three dimensions; he argue that superstructure can influence structure and infrastructure, that is,
his determinism has a probabilistic nature.
References
1. Dow J. W. Cultural-Biological Materialism / J. W. Dow // Stu­
dying societies and cultures: Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism and its legacy. Paradigm Publishers. – 2006. – P. 180–193.
2. Ferguson R. B. Marvin of Schermerhorn (Marvin Harris at Columbia in the 1970s) / R. B. Ferguson. Faculty House, Columbia University, 2010.
3. Harris M. Cultural materialism: The Struggle for a Science of
Culture / M. Harris. – New York : Random House, 1979. – 383 p.
4. Marx K. Selected Works, Volume Three / K. Marx, F. Engels. –
Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1970 [1859].
5. Marx K. The German Ideology / K. Marx, F. Engels. – Collected
Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 5. – New York : International
Publishers, 1976 [1846]. – P. 19–92.
6. Williams Raymond. Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory / Raymond Williams // Problems in Materialism and
Culture. – London : Verso, 1980. – P. 31–49.
Бідочко Л. Я.
ТЕОРЕТИЧНІ ЗАСАДИ ТА ВИТОКИ КУЛЬТУРНОГО МАТЕРІАЛІЗМУ
В ПОЛІТИЧНІЙ НАУЦІ
У статті розглянуто основні методологічні та теоретичні основи культурного матеріалізму як
антропологічного підходу та дослідницької стратегії. Культурний матеріалізм – це теоретична
парадигма, яка базується на ідеї, що соціальне життя, політична культура є відповіддю на практичні проблеми земного існування. Він постав у американській антропологічній науці наприкінці
1960-х років, на перетині історичного матеріалізму, неоеволюціонізму і культурної екології. Це неопозитивістська спроба привнесення в соціальні та гуманітарні науки методології природничих.
У центрі уваги Марвіна Гарріса та інших прибічників культурного матеріалізму стоять такі категорії, які підлягають верифікації. Тож цей підхід продовжує аналіз економічних чинників за Марксом, демографічних за Мальтусом та екологічних за Вайтом та Стюардом. Бувши критиком інонауковості, М. Гарріс розвиває Марксову ідею базису й надбудови, послуговуючись категоріями трирівневої моделі. Кожна культурна система містить три компоненти: інфраструктуру як спосіб
виробництва і відтворення, структуру як суспільні відносини та надструктуру як ідеологічні відносини. Принцип інфраструктурного детермінізму вказує, що культурні явища мають матеріалістичне пояснення, проте сам М. Гарріс не виключає зворотного каузального зв’язку.
Ключові слова: культурна антропологія, культурний матеріалізм, детермінізм, емічне і етичне,
історичний матеріалізм, марксизм, неоеволюціонізм, редукціонізм, базис і надбудова.
Матеріал надійшов 24.09.2016